[Manga] OneManga Shutting Down

At the end of the month, OneManga will be no more. This is a shame, but not really a shock, especially given what I've read of a manga sales slump. I've always been a big fan, mostly due to the subscription extension that sits in the upper right of Chrome telling me when I had new chapters to read.

Though I have to say the more reaction I read to this news, the happier I was they were closing. The entitlement of leeches and the internet generation is not surprising, but the way people were railing against publishers, mangaka, official distributors, etc, and whining about how they "NEED" their manga and this will kill sales was simply laughable. I have to admit I kind of like seeing their toys taken away even if inconveniences me some.

Of course anyone with the tiniest bit of maturity will nod to the inevitability and move on to other sources, such as mangareader.net or go back to pulling chapters directly from the scanlators themselves. Personally, I prefer owning the books anyways and hope that with something of the flooded market they have, prices will either fall on individual volumes or they'll start selling larger collections/box sets for easier to swallow prices. Happened with anime at least after years of $30 per hour on DVD being a deal, you can finally find complete series for $30 or less relatively routinely.

In any case, reminisce on onemanga here or discuss the potentially perilous future for US Manga publishers, or the whack-a-mole nature of trying to squash digital fan distribution.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by SailorDaravon

While there's certainly some people reacting this way, a lot of the shit I was reading as far as I can tell isn't licensed, but scanlation sites are going down completely, so I can't even get that stuff anymore. Also I've been waiting for some stuff to get a box set treatment or drop in price for a long-ass time and it hasn't happened yet (see One Piece, although they have started doing the 3-in-1 thing finally). Ultimately as someone who is actually willing to buy shit, this just makes everything a bigger pain in the ass for me, and will actually cause me to buy less shit. Again, the people who want to pirate will still find ways, so I'm just not really seeing how this works out for them long-term.

So here's the way I look at it. Manga sales have dropped roughly a third over the last couple of years which is pretty significant, especially for a relatively niche market. If your market is getting to the point where you're going through layoffs, your sales are plummeting and there are people illegally putting out your product for free on the web I think it's far worse business to do nothing. US Manga publishers aren't doing this solely for the love of the product as shocking and disappointing as that may be. I'm sure they do love the product and that fueled their initial business models, but it is a business. It's hard enough to compete against free when times are good, but when you're just trying to stay afloat, free is a serious threat to your continued existence. If they can't stay afloat, then there will be no more English language manga to purchase and by extension less money getting to manga creators to support new titles and reward existing successful ones.

Yes, there is some collateral damage with unlicensed series becoming mildly more inconvenient to get. But really, let's face it, while some scanlation hosting sites might go down, scanlators, particularly those of unlicensed series aren't going anywhere, torrents, direct download, and even on-line readers will never be terribly difficult to come by if you're interested in it. And maybe some people might be less aware of certain series by not having them all aggregated at one site for free reading, and maybe that might amount to a few volumes unsold.

Now, I have no hard numbers to correlate on-line readership increasing while sales declined, but I'm going to guess that while they may not be directly related, one was certainly going up while the other was going down. I think to anyone in the business that sounds like a lot of lost sales. I'm also going to guess that in their models the loss of "mainstream" title sales (Naruto/Bleach/One Piece etc) is going to far outweigh the few titles someone may have run across on-line and then still be willing to purchase even after already reading it on-line.

I like free and easy access to everything as much as the next guy, but there is no way I could ever construe this as bad business on the part of the publishers. Yes, they have a lot on their plate to deal with, changing demographics, novelty factor wearing off a bit, increasing visibility, needing stronger tv show tie-ins to draw interest, the on-line availability genie being out of the bottle for most of their market. Despite all that though, sidelining what is potentially your most damaging competition probably trumps all of that, especially when that competition isn't entirely legal. If that clears the way for their own subscription service, which seems likely, great, or if it simply clears the way for their own on-line chapter freebie teasers to get people to buy books, also great. The industry certainly needs some changes to remain viable, and chief among them is exerting some control over the distribution of the material they paid for and base their existence on.

Honestly, I always kind of marveled at the fact that OneManga existed long enough to get to the size it was and achieve the status it seemed to have. It honestly just didn't seem possible for something like that to exist unchallenged. In a way, to me, it seems like the reality of the situation just caught up to it.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by SailorDaravon

Yeah sorry, I didn't mean to sound like the US publishers were filthy assholes or anything; they're completely within their rights to do what they've done. I'm just questioning ultimately what the long-term results of this would be. If they had cracked down like this when these big sites first started popping up, it would have been a different story. But big, easily accessible sites have been around for so long now that a lot of people are basically spoiled and won't buy anything.

No worries, I think I was responding as much to you as I was things I've read elsewhere slagging on the publishers for this as well as the general argument/rationalization that piracy in any form is good for an industry's business, which is honestly a bit silly. Won't say I haven't done it myself in some variety in the past, but fundamentally it is silly and wrong (but then there always is the public library argument, so what do I know).

But yeah the point you make echoes one of my worries of the genie ultimately being out of the bottle. People have been reading weekly updates so long, that the vast majority of the market who would've been interested in buying has already probably been hooked on it and can't really consider going back. Which makes a competing crunchyroll-esque model with maybe a week lag time the only real option. Weekly print releases would be nice I think, but I just can't see any way to make that viable with the struggles being found in print media. If they could put together a digital storefront for ipads/android tablets that I think would be a good start.

The upside to the struggles of the industry I think is that collaboration from the big players like Viz and Tokyopop becomes more likely for them all to stay alive and build a bigger market to share since they aren't competitors to eachother in the traditional sense. It's not like they're offering competing Naruto translations or something, so perhaps some mutually beneficial agreements can be forged. If Capcom and Namco or Nintendo and Sega can get along these days for the hopes of printing more money, anything can happen.

I also fully agree on the point of a flooded market. I can't blame them for trying to bring over as much diversity as possible, but there is just so much it's staggering and then assuming you find something you dig, getting up to date on a series is daunting as hell. Would you like to get into Bleach? Well that'll only be some $200+ for the last 30 books an that's figuring the relatively cheap $100 price tag for the first 21 volume box set. Comparatively you can get the first 121 eps of the series for that, value that as you may. Considering I know I used to pay $35 for 3-4 eps on a DVD and nevermind the old $60 for 2 eps of dubbed Lodoss War on VHS that I could never stomach, anime certainly seems to be making more reasonable price advances.

Release speed is a double edged sword. I remember when I started buying manga back in '04/'05 I think. It quickly got to be a $200 a month habit in those early days and I had to scale it back. Anytime I wander by a manga shelf at Barnes and Noble I'm still shocked by how much is out there and honestly by how close to up to date they've managed to get (I had no idea Kurohime was even licensed let alone how many volumes had already seen release here). The amount of ground they've covered in a few years really is very impressive, but I think it's also caused a bit of an overload.

It's a very damned if they do damned if they don't situation. If they don't make everything available, people will complain about not getting their favorite series. If they bring everything over people get overwhelmed and they invariably end up with losses on the more niche of the niche titles. If they followed a Japanese tank release schedule we'd be interminably years behind and there would be even more complaints about being behind. However, if they play catch up at a reasonable pace, there is again just too much to buy too quickly.

Sorry, this has gotten awfully rambly and I've lost focus several times while sitting here watching Top Gear trying to write this so this is going to be horribly proofed and edited, but oh well. In the end though, I think we all fundamentally agree that the US manga situation is a thorny one by any measure. I have no idea how one can really walk the line of market flooding and at the same time trying to meet all the exacting demands of manga nerds, and keep up to date with the insane Japanese release schedules with relatively low manpower and keep it all profitable on top of that. I do hope they employ someone smarter than me who can sort it out and can help actually grow the US market successfully, probably with some sort of digital distro.

(To anyone who knew my posting style before, it might not be much shorter these days I guess, but hey I've added line breaks, that's something... right?)

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.